William James and the Moral Will

1 HUMANITAS 35 William James and the Moral WillWilliam James and the Moral WillJeff PoletMalone CollegeRichard Rorty has characterized William James as an aestheticironist whose orientation was away from philosophy and towardan artistic pose that addressed itself contemptuously towarddominant modes of discourse. In his view, James taught us whatit is like to live in a world without metaphysical comforts, onewhere our notions of truth were no longer operative or relevant,and one where our beliefs were judged purely in terms of Due to such interpretations, James has largely been con-sidered a figure whose writings leave little room for traditionalphilosophical thinking or religious For Rorty, the most im-portant category of thought is contingency, and any mode ofthinking (or believing)

2 Which attempts to supercede the contingentstate of affairs is necessarily guilty of useless takes this approach for the very good reason that ahistoricalforms of thinking tend to undermine proper ethical decision-mak-AUTHOR S NOTE: I am grateful to Michael Federici, Douglas Henry, and the re-viewers for their helpful suggestions concerning this , for example Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1989), 46; Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers,Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 63. In general, Rorty seesJames as a hero of American leftist thought.

3 See Achieving our Country: LeftistThought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1997).2 Rorty does qualify his view in his essay Religious Belief, Intellectual Re-sponsibility, and Romance in Ruth-Anna Putnam, ed., The Cambridge Companionto William James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), where he sug-gests that James wanted to leave space for a privatized religious belief, as longas it didn t lead to the formation of Volume XIV, No. 2, 2001 Jeff Poleting. The proper result of ethics, according to Rorty, is to minimizecruelty as much as possible (though he is quick to point out thathe can t defend this belief, only assert it).

4 Since the American Lefthas long been opposed to cruelty, and the American Right em-braces it, any truly ethical person will be a leftist and seek to ex-pand the power of the state as the vehicle that protects the weakfrom the strong and insures contingency seriously, however, also means attentiveanalysis of thinkers historical circumstances and how their writ-ing is a response to the world around them. Analyzing James inthis fashion shows a thinker not simply dismissive of metaphysicsand religion, nor one necessarily hospitable to leftist agendas, buta person who was deeply concerned that without religious beliefand philosophical truth, individual freedom would be in gravedanger, and human action would be misguided.

5 While Rorty cor-rectly identifies James s suspicion of absolutes, his analysis misses themain purpose of these suspicions: the development of the Moral context for the emergence of James s thought was the de-velopment of science, the nineteenth-century belief in infiniteprogress, and the boredom accompanying the formation of masssociety. Sensitive to the attenuation of religious spirit, given to fitsof despair, and concerned about meaningful human action in amass age attempting to navigate between the Scylla of actionwithout purpose and the Charybdis of purpose without action James sought in the religious experience the resources to ward offcivilizational ennui.

6 In affirming not only the reality but also theefficacy of the Moral will , James opened up a philosophical paththat justified the attempt to exercise meaningful freedom. The pur-suit of philosophical and religious thinking, as a means to effectthe development of the Moral will so that freedom could be mean-ingfully exercised, was the great struggle and result of James s re-flections. To achieve this end, James de-absolutized the truth toservice the de-socialization of individuals, in the sense of freeingthem from the coercive forces of mass civilization. This twin pro-cess of de-absolutization and de-socialization is reflected nega-tively in his response to science and religion, and positively in hisdevelopment of pragmatic philosophy.

7 In this article, I will exam-ine James s contribution to the development of the idea of a moralwill by looking at three issues: (1) the response to the problem ofparticularity, relating James s thought to philosophical monismRorty missespurpose ofJames ssuspicion soughtto exercisemeaningfulfreedom in amass 37 William James and the Moral Willand American Puritanism; (2) the response to positivism and sub-sequent claims about the nature of knowledge; and (3) James sanalysis of religious experience and its relation to ethical action. Iwill conclude by looking at the political ramifications of his analy-sis, which demonstrate the connection between Moral experienceand action the crux of the pragmatist impulse.

8 My main thesis isthat the Moral will requires for its grounding a rejection ofahistorical absolutism as well as a suspicion of non-philosophicalhistoricism. James demonstrates how this can be and Religious AbsolutismOffhand, the relation between science and Puritanism is not ob-vious, but they constituted for James the two social realities at thecore of his philosophical struggle. In modern science he saw thetendency to reduce knowledge to technique and mechanize the so-cial sphere, and in Puritanism he saw the tendency to both, he felt the tendency to subordinate experience to system-atized knowledge; he saw them as truncated types of existencewhich could not do justice to the complexity and depth of our ex-perience.

9 In other words, he believed they both operated with im-properly absolutist notions of science assumes the separation of the self from natureand the belief that if reason, narrowly defined, can be brought tobear on any complex of problems, it will provide workable solu-tions. In short, rather than viewing nature as a revelatory text, itviews nature as material substance to be controlled and manipu-lated. The sciences reach their apogee in the attempt to control notonly nature, but also human nature. Science sets itself up as thecultural touchstone of any legitimate knowledge claim. It occupiesthe authoritative position at the center of our culture and recog-nizes no a priori or more embracing knowledge claim.

10 Faced withthe deterministic proclivity of science, the philosopher, as a hu-man being, becomes concerned about the status of human faced the problem of scientific determinism the disturbing sense that scientific knowledge rendered talkof human freedom meaningless, Kant sought to protect the mostcherished experiences of life from the claims of science. The pur-pose of the First Critique, as he notes in the Second Preface, is todetermine to what degree, if any, scientific knowledge intrudesinto the realm of metaphysics, here concerned with the experi-Modernscience andPuritanismboth tendedto Volume XIV, No.